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The Tip.It Times

31st August 2014Issue 28499gp

The Leak Jagex Doesn't Want You to Read!

Written by Alg and edited by n/a

By now you've probably realized that we at the Times are completely oblivious of the concept of 'boundaries'. There isn't a single line that we won't cross in order to deliver a story, even if it would be stupid or pointless to do so. That's why I'm proud to present some slightly used and possibly relevant information: some insight into the upcoming Elf City's development process.

DELAYS

This is kind of the big one here. The city was first announced with a planned release date of early Summer, bundled with Plague's End. The truth is that, as you've probably expected, crippling and often surreal bugs forced them to push back the release date. These unintended features ranged from something as small as a single misplaced pixel on the base of a statue, up to making Vorago drop millions of gold worth of cheese if he was fought on a Sunday.

Normally these features would have gone through just fine and nobody would have been the wiser, but a pair of enterprising employees decided to dig a little bit deeper. While the rest of the office worked tirelessly to resolve the bigger issues, these two brave souls discovered that a disgruntled employee was sneaking into the office late at night to sabotage the project. They caught him with plenty of time to spare, but unfortunately he was a vital piece of the project, and so they had to spend most of summer training a replacement.

As a reward for their part in this, the two amateur detectives were allowed to drive Mark Gerhard's tank through Cambridge for a total of three hours.

NEW FEATURES

Not everything made it into the development diaries, of course. While Jagex might want to keep certain things a surprise, I have no such moral boundaries. Of course, the former point made it hard to get any information, but I was able to uncover two interesting tidbits before they discovered what I was doing.

The first? Crystal planks. Cut crystal trees, get crystal logs, turn your house into a geode. They were meant to come out with the construction rework, but you know how Jagex is. They'll cost 10k each at the sawmill, and like Teak and Mahogany logs, there will be special logs that can drop the price. I'll bet you forgot about those.

The second is a bit more complicated. There's a secret lore book about the relationship between Seren and Guthix that can only be found if you stand at the coordinates 01.10 south, 05.13 west with 35 ranging guild tickets, a raw salmon, and 10 crystal motherlode shards. I would have submitted it to the site so that those of you who didn't want to bother with the legwork could enjoy it, but it was rather... torrid. The administration advised against it.

CUT CONTENT

Every update has features that just didn't make it in. Maybe they weren't done in time, maybe they just weren't good, you know how it is. As far as I could tell, much of it just involved crystal variants of existing content, such as the RockCandyFish, requiring 99 fishing and cooking to process. There was supposed to be a variant of the Makeover Mage, who would have been able to customize your avatar's ears: it was cut because the higher-ups could not believe that letting us have pointy ears took up more than half of the budget, and they wanted to save face.

Finally, we were supposed to be able to get access to the Max Guild on beta servers last month, but I couldn't find any information about what happened to it.

CLOSING COMMENTS

I had to do a lot of terrible things to get this information to you. Things I won't be able to tell my grandchildren about, like getting a job at Jagex or framing a guy for sabotaging the elf city update. As of now, though, I can say that it was worth it just because I was able to break the story here before someone at Reddit got their hands on it.

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